The president of the United States is no fan of the nation’s justice system. With the rise of Donald Trump to power, a new flagrant lawlessness has begun to define the Oval Office. The president and his associates have attempted to sidestep the rule of law and shown basically no intention of changing their behavior anytime soon.
As the latest instance of that behavior, President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Sunday to again furiously go after the nation’s justice system. Although there are an array of pieces of evidence that have come to light in the past couple years suggesting illegal behavior on the part of the president’s team, he continues to maintain that the entire Russia investigation is a witch hunt.
Sunday on Twitter, he shared a quote from angry former Clinton aide Mark Penn, who said:
‘Why are there people from the Clinton Foundation on the Mueller Staff? Why is there an Independent Counsel? To go after people and their families for unrelated offenses…Constitution was set up to prevent this…Stormtrooper tactics almost.’
To begin with, the implication that any number of individuals “from” the Clinton Foundation are working in the office of Special Counsel for the Russia investigation Robert Mueller doesn’t cover the whole story. The individual in question with a past relationship with the Clinton Foundation is Jeannie Rhee, who represented the organization in a 2015 racketeering case. She also represented Hillary Clinton personally in a lawsuit that same year which sought to have her private emails released.
Although she is perhaps able to be seen as ideologically aligned with Democrats, she’s not just some transplanted Clinton staffer. She worked for two years as deputy assistant attorney general under Eric Holder, advising the Obama era attorney general and other officials in the administration on an array of legal issues.
In addition, Mueller’s old firm WilmerHale, where Rhee worked, hasn’t even focused on representing Democrats. Prominent fact-checker Glenn Kessler pointed out that the firm has also represented individuals like former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Trump family members Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
In other words, yet again, the president’s criticism has fallen flat.
He certainly can’t be expected to let up any time soon, though. That point is well represented by the fact that along with his parroting of what is at best a half-truth, he resorts to virulent rhetoric comparing justice officials in the United States to Nazi operatives. (Stormtroopers, although also characters in the popular Star Wars stories, were members of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.)
It’s actually something his lawyer Rudy Giuliani has already done in the past, having shared the comparison during the same Fox appearance that he revealed Trump had actually reimbursed Michael Cohen for a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels after all.
That specific talking point is hardly the only one that the president and his allies have used in their fight against Mueller, and the possibility of the special counsel’s team interviewing the president continues to hang in the air and push Trump and his allies towards even more desperate defenses.
Check out Twitter’s response below.
Featured Image via Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
